‘Oh, Christ.’
Straker smiled to himself. He suddenly felt the time might be now: ‘Well, sir, this is what I’ve been thinking…’
Straker took a shower and got into bed. His mind was still whirring. It didn’t let him sleep. It wasn’t long before he even feared falling asleep. Haunting him, above all, was Sabatino's reaction to the deaths at the Grand Prix – the way, unprompted, she had responded so emotionally and sympathetically to the horrific news that people had died. Then he thought of the guilt the Russian State officially wanted to lay on her: his mind was contemplating the consequences. He couldn’t rationalize the mounting restrictions and limitations which the Russians were putting up against them. Any one of those impediments would be an insult to justice and a fair trial. Having them all bearing down on their case was quite absurd. Under these circumstances, Straker couldn’t see their defence now being anything other than inadequate against the charges.
The next morning, McMahon re-appeared at the hotel five minutes earlier than expected. But Straker wasn’t there.
She asked if any messages had been left for her.
There weren’t any.
She asked reception to ring his room.
There was no reply.
She asked to have his name paged through all the restaurants in the hotel.
After a sweep of them all, as well as all the public areas on the ground floor, there was no response.
McMahon returned to her car. She tried Straker on his cell phone but then remembered he had left it with Sabatino in the hospital.
As the car pulled away, McMahon had to admit – if only to herself – that she was more than just a little concerned.
THIRTY
Straker had awoken at three o’clock that morning. He had barely slept, more like drifting in and out of consciousness – dreading a return to the horrific flashbacks of his rendition and torture. It had taken him years to grapple with the psychological effects of his treatment at the hands of the Americans in Afghanistan, having suffered the intelligence equivalent of friendly fire. He thought his immersion in the polar expedition had offered him a distraction from those disturbances, and yet here he was – after only one day in Russia – in danger of sliding straight back down again.
His rough night soon turned to anger. To preserve his own sanity, Straker had to act. But what? What could he do?
Straker turned on the lights in the spectacular rooms of the hotel and set about channelling his anger. Firing up his laptop, he searched for a Google Earth shot of the city. He was looking for satellite images of the Zhar-ptitsa Autodrom. The best of those available had been taken during the construction of the circuit. Straker saved the picture in a PowerPoint slide. He then searched “Russian Grand Prix” and scanned the resultant entries. He found what he was looking for: a diagram of the track offering labels and a legend for all the elements making up the race track complex. Cross- referencing that with his satellite image, Straker was able to insert text labels into his slide. As it took shape, he could identify what he was looking for. Better still, he had a clear idea of the terrain directly around his objective.
Straker thought about the kit and equipment he might need. A key requirement would be a record-taking device. He decided his phone would be ideal, but then swore – realizing he had left it with Sabatino in the hospital. Then he remembered McMahon had retrieved a phone from the suite upstairs. Straker examined it. Being a Quartech one, it was the same make and model as his own; for what he wanted, its camera, 240fps video and data store would be fine. Having been left on its charger, there was no need to worry about battery life.
Straker thought about his cover.
Unpacking his suitcase, he pulled out his running kit and the small rucksack he always carried while travelling. He played with a combination of clothes before deciding on the look he wanted to project. He realized he needed a couple of additions to his kit. Looking through the room he couldn’t find exactly what he was after but, at the foot of the wardrobe, he managed to find a couple of white plastic laundry bags. These were stuffed into the side pouches of his rucksack. Half an hour later, Straker was dressed.
Armed with the key details he had downloaded onto Sabatino's phone, he was ready to go. McMahon's words, though, kept ringing round his head:
Contempt of court … Five years’ imprisonment.
Slipping out of his room, Straker made for the servants’ staircase. It was an echoey well, stretching from the basement right up through the building to the sixth floor. He waited just inside it – listening for any voices or footsteps. He made his way down cautiously – not wanting anyone to know he was leaving the hotel.
Dropping down onto the ground floor, he found a door into a utility area at the rear of the building. Thankfully, there was no one there either. A number of lights were on, but whoever had needed them was away from their work. Straker walked swiftly through to a glass-panelled door. This had to be an outside wall: darkness and the orange glow from a streetlight showed through the frosted glass. Straker dreaded it being locked. He tried the latch.
Shit!
It was stuck fast.
Straker flinched. A clang rang out behind him. He did not want to be discovered in here, not at such a suspicious time of the morning. Gripping the handle again with more force, and pushing the door in against its jamb, he tried it again. Thankfully it clicked open; layers of paint, rather than a lock, had caused it to stick.
There were more sounds behind him.
Slipping through the door, Straker pulled it shut behind him and quickly ducked down below the level of the glass.
The middle-aged laundry manager had just re-entered the room. He had caught sight of someone dressed as a jogger slip out from the back of the building. The Cossack's immediate thought was: thief. Not wanting to be accused of anything himself, should something have been stolen, he hurried to the phone on the wall and reported the sighting to hotel security.
Straker, meantime, was out in the cold dark Moscow air. Walking along the back alley, away from the Raushkaya Naberezhnaya, he emerged onto Sadovnicheskaya Ulitsa. At that time of night the roads were virtually devoid of traffic. He headed on, across the Bolotny Ostrov, before reaching the waterfront on the south side of this island in the Moskva River. He had to wait five minutes before seeing a taxi. Climbing into the back, Straker asked for the Saint Alexander Nevsky Church: at four in the morning he would be a memorable fare and did not want to reveal his precise destination. Straker planned to be dropped some distance away.
As the car made its way through the Russian capital, Moscow seemed to be as eerie as his long-held preconceptions of it. Cold War images were hard to forget. Wide streets, the imperial splendour of landmark buildings, the brutality of Stalinist architecture. For its twenty years of post-communist existence, Straker had a sense – or at least could find it easy to imagine – that one form of harsh politics or another lay only just below the surface here.
Twenty minutes later, travelling through the more mundane parts of Moscow, Straker's cab reached his destination. It pulled up beside the beautiful onion-shaped dome and brilliant-white walls of the Alexander Nevsky Church, all of which, in the darkness, was being bathed in brilliant floodlight.
Straker climbed out into the cold morning air. Waiting for the taxi to be out of sight, he took in the area around him. Next to the church, running north/south, was the dual carriageway of Prospekt Andropova. This stretched off into the dark. Traffic was a little busier here, but still sparse compared to his experience of it the day before.
Straker readied himself. He concentrated and got himself into “character”. Now dressed as a jogger – loose top, long tracksuit bottoms, running shoes, backpack and woolly hat – he could pass for any urban fitness freak on any street anywhere in the world.
Setting off, he jogged away down the pavement beside the dual carriageway, over the causeway – across the Moskva River – towards the Nagatinskaya Poyma Park.
After a quarter of a mile, now fully on the peninsula, he pulled out Sabatino's phone and turned it on. Looking at the map he had compiled, he orientated himself, scanning the lie of the land around him. He was pleased: he was very near his Start Line.
In the gloom, it was hard to see. But he found it.
At an angle of forty-five degrees or so from the road, a narrow overhung footpath led off into the trees. Discreetly, Straker cast one last eye up and down the pavement he was on, saw there was no one within the limited view offered in the dark, and headed off into the murkiness of the forest.
In among the trees it was even darker, with no ambient light from any of the buildings or the city penetrating the undergrowth. In such blackness, its meandering course could easily have been disorientating.
Five minutes on and Straker found himself breaking through a treeline onto a broad mown-grass avenue, running left to right in front of him. The sky above the clearing was greyer, even with the heavy cloud cover – rendering it here slightly less than pitch black. A light breeze rustled the tops of the trees. There were no other sounds – no human sounds nearby; just a muffled rumble of traffic away in the distance.
